The Pulmonary Rehabilitation (PR) service at Cabin Creek Health Center was developed to improve ability of people with chronic lung disease  (COPD and Black Lung) to continue with their lives despite their disease.   Of course the health center staff was aware that COPD afflicted many of our patients; but we did not understand that we could offer a rehab service right  in our rural health center that would improve a patients breathing and their ability to do the things that matter to them.

We learned about the power of PR from Ted Koppel, the famous news commentator, and his wife Grace Anne Dorney Koppel, who contacted us to say that they and their Dorney-Koppel Foundation was interested in helping to bring PR to West Virginia communities with high rates of lung disease. Grace Anne was a victim of severe COPD herself who describes how she  “got her life back”  with the education and guided exercise that she received from a pulmonary rehab program.  Scientific studies have also established that PR  has helped many people  with breathing problems get their life back.

So Cabin Creek Health partnered with the Koppels and other partners including the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation, the United Mine Workers and CAMC to start one of the first PR programs in the country that was located in a rural health center.  This was a bold new idea – to put pulmonary rehab in rural and small-town community health centers. But we have shown that it works and the Dorney-Koppel Foundation and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation have now supported the development of pulmonary rehab in nine other rural Appalachian communities. We are very proud of helping to start and maintain this expanding service; and we are indebted to Grace Anne Dorney Koppel and Ted for their  commitment to the notion that all people with lung disease, even in rural mountain communities, should have access to pulmonary rehab.  And that’s why the name.